POETRY AND PITY
Tremendous swagged, fringed, and roped retro curtains , the Gielgud looking much as it would 100 years ago when Sean O’Casey’s most famous play reached London. Before them hangs a single high crucifix, below it a simple stove. And when the drapes flourish aside to reveal a Dublin tenement room, its detail draws you right into a hardscrabble life,down to the frying pan and the battered tin box where young Mary keeps her precious hair-ribbons.
Matthew Warchus (with design by Rob Howell )does well to take care of the physical detail: there is always a special fascination in contemporaneous plays from past decades, by a writer who knew and lived in such exact rooms and conditions. Curiously, it is that period reality which wakens a wider pity for all conflicts which hard down on the humblest. O’Casey sets this in 1922, the Irish civil war still raging, when in one family there could be former allies falling out, republican ‘diehards’ set against ‘free-staters’. Juno and Jack Doyle’s family has its own ordinary problems. He’s an idle drunk, she just about keeps them fed, this harder even than usual because daughter Mary is on strike and her brother Johnny disabled, one-armed and lame from his share in the fighting . He is a mournful occasional presence, bitterly uneasy – we will learn why – and afraid to leave the flat. He sees nightmare ghosts, unable to rest without a candle burning safely in front of the Virgin Mary’s statue in the unseen room behind the curtain. They all live within a deeper violence, and all through the first act come odd moments of shock: Aisling Kearns’ Mary reading aloud the detail of exit-wounds on the latest young body found, Jack and Joxer, tipsily carefree, suddenly soberly nervous at a rapping at the door below that sounds “like no-one that belongs to this house”. Llow distant street sounds make heads turn sharply.
In in the foreground, and this is what which has made O”Casey’s Irish play echo through many times and nations, there is the comedy of Jack Doyle himself : an almost music-hall turn in drunken, self-glorifying fantasy, eloquent in inventive complaint about everything from the clergy to “pains in the legs” striking whenever a possible navvying job is mentioned, tipsily co-dependent with the sly parasitical Joxer. There is laughter at the pair being cowed by Juno’s entirely reasonable furies of impatience at their lurching hopelessness and empty pride. Mark Rylance is on irresistible form as Jack : a piercing tipsy stare beneath heavy black brows, his tiny moustache and striped pants sometimes seeming almost Charlie-Chaplin as he lurches around, airing fantasy reminiscences about global seafaring exploits (one passage on a collier to Liverpool).
He’s a wonderful joke: the immemorial Mr Hopeless, comedy drunk right down to a mournful little ditty about a robin, sung over the stove. Rylance, as ever, is a scene-stealer. Even more when, as the second act begins, he has been told of a legacy and gone massively into debt for fancy furniture, cabinets of china and glass and a smart new suit (again, brilliantly evoked with loving detail). An idle drunk who’s gone up in the world and thinks he’s posh is of course even funnier.
But the genius of the play is that Jack Doyle is a comic figure living in the middle of a tragedy. He didn’t cause it, but he doesn’t rise to it with any dignity or real human sweetness. Juno, on the other hand, is magnificent, and does. J.Smith Cameron (Gerri from Succession on TV!) is compelling, unforcedly real: worn out but full of hope that Jack will pull himself together, tenderly anxious over the gaunt, haunted youth Johnny (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) and tolerant of the social activism of Mary and her lover Jerry (Leo Hannah). She is everything that is decent and, sadly for them all, believes in hope and luck when a stranger arrives with news of their inheritance (another kind of shock in his very appearance: so dapperly dressed, such a fine overcoat, next to the women’s careful drab and the shambling Jack’s tragic trousers.
We care for them all, laughing or admiring; with Anna Healy’s Mrs Madigan they celebrate and break into song (Irish songs, and odd musical moments, are brilliantly used). But no sooner have we laughed at Healey’s terrifying top C than a funeral passes and a broken mother is among them, speaking the famous prayer to the Virgin Mary to “take away hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh”. But they laugh together again; someone has to.
That the play darkens deeply in its longer second half is famous, but no spoilers for those coming new to it. Only to say that we have, by then, been drawn to affection and concern for the reality of the Boyles, the poetry and the pity of humanity. But will be soured, too, by the reality of Jack Doyle, patriarch and drunken fantasist. I was uneasy for a while after Rylance’s magnetism in the glorious first scenes, wondering how well even this great actor would serve O’Casey’s final merciless dissection of a man’s egotistical worthlessness. But in the moments of Jack’s continuing, reckless, cruel self-pity Rylance does this for us. It is both brilliant and painful to watch.
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Rating 5
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